I've been trying to figure out why John Petersen always tries to hijack threads in the UT to put VFP and VFP users down. He may start with an innocent sounding question to draw others in but pretty soon has the big rethorical guns blazing.

At first I thought the reason may be conviction since some of the arguments sounded reasonable, but soon it was obvious there was some other and much stronger motivation.

Then I thought maybe it's some deep ego need: in order to feel superior he felt it necessary to put other people down. While there may be something to that, I think there is a more rational explanation to this puzzling behavior.

Maybe we are just target practice. One technique to win an argument is to attack your opponent personally or to attack something dear to him. This makes the opponent angry and his anger leads to mistakes. Then you exploit the mistakes until the opponent gives up in frustration. We are a good group to practice that technique because we have a lot invested in VFP and care deeply about it.

Maybe we are the subject of a term paper, or even a master thesis in law school.